The ClockĬhanges to clock technology were symptomatic of their time. The city bustled, money changed hands, and the industrious citizens couldn’t be late to an appointment or wait for other people in vain.Ĭities became echoes of clanging bells, announcing all kinds of events. Public squares started to ring bells on the hour. The rhythm of life in the city for merchants and artisans didn’t adapt to the endless dance of the sun and the moon either.īusiness demands imposed the cultivation of new values such as punctuality or efficiency. If clocks were originally designed to serve God, it didn’t take long for them to be used in the service of other gods. Time was to be dedicated to meditation, a sign of virtue. To waste time was to waste a gift from God. This is how future ingenuity was born.įor medieval theologians, time was as important as it was irreplaceable. Clocks suddenly filled the common spaces, letting everyone in the community know when it was time to pray. Once the prayer schedule was fixed, monks had to pay attention to time. That led to more stable schedules in the monasteries. In contrast to farmers, monks had to adapt their work around prayer. The new monastic rules, much stricter than before, imposed a way of life centered on prayer. The key elements of this change were New Monasticism and urban life. From public clocks in Padua and Bologna to church clocks in Chartres and Wells, people started to perceive time in a very different way. Central and Western Europe became inundated with all types of mechanical clocks. However, something happened in the 13th, 14th, and 15th century that changed everything. Clocks weren’t common, nor well-known, nor necessary. Any other activities, both religious or secular, had to adapt to the rhythm of agricultural work. They followed the natural cycles of the seasons and the days. Most Europeans lived off the land, either cultivating crops or raising animals. Just like urban electricity ended the tyranny of the night, the clock freed busy men from the rhythm of the sun. However, the service that the sun and the moon provide is, at the same time, a kind of slavery. The measurement of days is as old as the observation of the stars. As French historian Jacques Le Goff said, time for a merchant isn’t the same as time for a farmer. The invention of the clock is, more than anything, a discovery of time. The astronomically-inspired Eastern water clocks, however, didn’t bring about the same kind of social change that mechanized clocks did in the West. The Islamic Civilization and the Chinese discovered the mysteries of time-keeping long before the Europeans. The art of clock-making, like so many other things, wasn’t born in Western Europe.
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